An incident at the Sun Tavern : Changing views about Native Americans in Georgian Britain

[Extract] This chapter does not claim to explain the causal link between increased moral admonishments against the ‘public shewing’ of Indigenous people and greater actual numbers of Indigenous people being displayed for profit in Britain. But it does outline the correlation between the new discursive moralising interest and the unsavoury practice of human commodification. It joins others in this volume that raise questions about the emancipatory e!ects of humanitarian speech into the nineteenth century. The chapter argues that there was a shift in the mode of discourse regarding Indigenous arrivals – a shift from political to moral, or from engagement with Empire to disengagement with Empire – that matched a change in the practical reception of such peoples. This was a change from fascinated though largely diplomatic responses to voyeuristic and increasingly privatised inclinations. The Lords’ resolutions of 1765 neatly encapsulate this overall shift, even though it took another few decades to play out fully and it did so in a roundabout fashion.